


Ta Rah, Broughton Boys

by zionmantis



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Rugby, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-23 01:01:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19140436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zionmantis/pseuds/zionmantis
Summary: A short, fast-paced ficlet describing The Entity's capture of David King.





	Ta Rah, Broughton Boys

David never liked Squirrel. 

Granted, he didn’t like much of anyone, but he _really_ didn’t like Squirrel. 

He liked to think it was more instinctual than anything to do with the man’s physical repugnance. David was no looker himself, and he liked to think he wasn’t that shallow. 

But Squirrel… 

Squirrel was thin, wiry; taller than David but with the kind of gawkiness that made David think he could break him in half with one little _snap_. He had one lazy eye, but in David’s opinion, that was the better eye—the one that looked at him was always watery, bloodshot, and too blue, like just-cleaned toilet water. Sometimes it ran, like Squirrel was crying, but only when Squirrel was really happy—when his reedy body shook with pleasure over the violence he inflicted. 

Like now. 

David knew the bosses didn’t like them to show anything but unity when they were operating as ‘debt collectors,’ but he couldn’t help but watch Squirrel out of the corner of his eye, lips tightening as Squirrel wailed on the poor sap tied helplessly to a chair. 

The man in the chair sobbed. Stevens? Was that his name? It didn’t matter. There were so many Stevens a week they all blended together in one purple-bruised mass, smelling of copper and desperation and bad life decisions. 

David liked to fight. He’d always liked to fight, something that’d given his toff parents and prep school teachers fits as he grew up. But this… this wasn’t fighting, what Squirrel did. This man could do nothing to defend himself. This was torture. 

“I don’t have it; I don’t have it,” the injured man blubbered, blood seeping out of one eye. David shifted uncomfortably as Squirrel launched another bony fist into it; he doubted that eye would ever be the same again. Breaking a nose; disfiguring a little, that was all well and good. But taking away a man’s vision? It didn’t sit right. 

“Stop,” David said in his low Mancunian growl, enough to make most of his other partners settle. Not so, Squirrel. He didn’t spare David a glance with either his wonky or gross eye before he brought his fist back once again. David grabbed it, nearly crushing Squirrel’s spindly bones beneath his tight grip. 

Squirrel howled, more out of crazed fury than pain, if David reckoned right. He’d fought guys like Squirrel in the ring before; those twitchy little livewires who live for sadism. 

David wasn’t one of those hard-asses that claimed adrenaline took away all pain. David always felt every blow that landed, and maybe that was why he still had that tiny spark of empathy, that piece of _something_ that made him want to stop Squirrel. Because Squirrel was different, like those other sparkies in the ring were different. Pain just didn’t come to people like that right away—or if it did, it’s just sensation, nothing more obnoxious than a mosquito come humming around. 

Squirrel turned to face him, wrenching his fist out of David’s, his watery eye twitching madly in its socket. He tried to speak, but his words ran together in one waterfall of foul language and guttural Geordie. 

“Boss said ‘intimidate.’ Boss didn’t say ‘mangle,’” David interrupted Squirrel’s mouth spewage, for once trying to imitate the calm, reasonable tone his father would use in business meetings. He could feel his own contemptuous sneer betraying his true feelings, however. 

Squirrel hissed and chittered at him. “Howay, brotha,” he said, the familiar term grating on David’s nerves. “This little shitehawk en’t nothin’ and got nothin,’ see?” 

“Which means,” David said with slow, barely-maintained patience, “that there’s no use’n clobberin’ his eyeballs out. ‘E’s a cardshark, en’t he? He’ll need them eyes to cheat his way back into our boss’s good graces.” 

Squirrel bared his sizable front teeth, but David could tell his reasoned words were getting through that thick rodent skull. Or they were until ‘Stevens’ or whatever his name was gave an expectorant cough and started laughing. 

David frowned, looking over Squirrel’s shoulder as the man’s laugh grew high-pitched and hysterical. Had Squirrel knocked something loose in the man’s brain? David had seen that before, too. Back in his illegal boxing days, his manager had called that a ‘fist-borne lobotomy.’ 

“Right, right, right, right, right,” the man repeated like a mantra as he cut through his own laughter with a sharp giggle. “I get it. We’re playin’ ‘good charver; bad charver;’ eh? Just havin’ a right old good laugh…” the man’s mangled eye burst then, a slow glop of dark red more than a fast stream of blood like David always imagined dripping slowly on his cheek. He didn’t seem to notice as he kept talking, David unconsciously taking a step back. 

“Do ya really not know, ya great wanker,” here the man spoke to David. “Really not know why yer ugly mate’s havin’ a good bash? It en’t that I owe yer boss. It’s that he _stole-_ " 

David didn’t understand what the man was on about, but by the way Squirrel's muscles tensed like an unsprung slinky, he knew. He knew, he _knew_ what was about to happen, but he couldn’t stop it because he’d stepped away when the man's eye burst; stepped away like a bleeding coward _like a bleeding coward_ \- 

“Stole and scarpered-” 

_Shut up shut up shut up_ , David pleaded silently for the man even as he reached uselessly for Squirrel, but Squirrel was too close and David too far away to prevent him from grabbing the tire iron they supposedly used only for visual intimidation and making quick, violent work of the man’s head. 

It cracked rather than caved, his spine snapping back as his neck broke. David hoped that was the moment the man died, rather than during the flurry of red-misted hits Squirrel proceeded to land, again and again. 

After what felt like an endless assault but was probably only a fraction of a second, David was there, grabbing Squirrel’s arm and preventing him from swinging. It was much too late for the man in the chair. 

Squirrel wrenched away and stood, body quivering. He bared his nickle-colored teeth at David, who put his own fist down but stood ready. He stared warily at Squirrel, whose runny, too-blue eye roamed across David’s face, taking in and analyzing his expression. 

“Ya killed him.” David said it calmly, but as he looked from Squirrel to the wrecked corpse in the chair, he felt an old, familiar burn deep in his chest—the ancient anger returning, the same fury and hate that got him kicked out of his first private school after sending a kid to the ER as punishment for cutting off half of Molly Bell’s hair—he’d smashed that kid; shoved him the wrong way through the play slide— _copper smell, assaulting the inside of his nose_ \- 

“I didn’t,” Squirrel said, and smiled sickly. A ring of yellow crowned the top of each off-white tooth. “’E was like this when we got here; weren’t ‘e? Owed to more bastards than just our boss-" 

“No.” Again, David’s voice was calm, but the burning fury in his eyes betrayed his intentions to Squirrel, as did his step toward him. 

Squirrel’s face twisted, and he brought up the tire iron again. 

But David wasn’t the light heavyweight Manchester off-circuit champion for nothing. He brought his fist up, and he slammed Squirrel right in his disgusting, weeping eye. 

Squirrel rocked off balance, dropping the tire iron. They stared at one another for a fraction of a moment, Squirrel’s eyelid already starting to swell. 

David willed him to come after him again; willed him because it’d make what he did next that much more justified. But, there was no such luck for the future misgivings that he knew would come too late for Squirrel.

Squirrel ran. He ran out the door and through the dark alleyway, and David followed, his mind a hive of pissed-off hornets. 

He was going to smash Squirrel. Smash him just like Squirrel smashed Stevens; smash him like David had smashed Nigel Worthington’s stupid stuck-up face into the playground gravel below the slide; smash him like he smashed that plonker referee that got him kicked out of Oxford—his mum had cried after that one, he remembered dully in the back of his head as the more animalistic parts of his brain urged him through the London fog.

That was the only thing that bothered him, just a bit—he hadn’t cared about his scholarship or school or his dad’s cold disappointment or what people thought of him; he’d just cared a bit when his mum cried through the phone while they were separated through plexiglass. 

“Oh, Mam,” he’d sighed through the crackly prison phone. “It en’t like I needed no degree. Pa’ll get over it.” 

“It’s not that,” she’d cried, looking at him through tear-streaked makeup that probably cost more than half the other jailbirds' mum’s houses. “I’m just… I’m afraid for you. I’m afraid… you’re going to kill someone some day…” 

That day had come. 

The fog in London was thick this time of year, egged on by pollution and cold, so David didn’t notice as it grew thicker around him until it obscured his vision so badly that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. 

He paused, the fog of anger slowly replaced by a fog of confusion and a fog of unnatural density. 

David wasn’t a stupid man. That was easy to mistake due to his thick, carefully cultivated Manchester accent and his charver wardrobe and propensity to punch anyone who just looked at him wrong, but he wasn’t stupid. 

So when he saw the campfire, wood-scented and marshmallow-worthy and something that decidedly did not belong in the broken streets of back alley London, he knew something had gone drastically wrong. 

Squirrel wasn’t here. _London_ wasn’t here. 

Those people… if he saw them out in the daylight, he’d might’ve assumed they were some sort of foreign acting troupe; there were no rugby fans here. Their clothes were out of place, some modern but not suited for London or the weather; others with wardrobes that looked decades out of style. 

There was something about their faces… something… desperate. The best actors in the world could never fake those hollow eyes, eyes full of the kind of fear that wasn’t immediate, but that knew death was just around the corner—starvation eyes; stage 5 cancer eyes. Only these people weren’t sick or starving, at least not that he could see. These were like… like the eyes of prisoners on the run who knew the dogs would tear them limb-from-limb once they caught up. The eyes of the hunted. 

In spite all that had come before, Squirrel was banished from his mind, replaced by a threat more immediate. 

David cleared his throat, walked forward, and said the only thing that came to his mind as he reached the falsely comforting heat of the campfire. 

“Oy.”


End file.
